Worcester County, MA

Settlement & growth (pre-1960)

Long before European arrival, the Nipmuc people inhabited the lands of Worcester County, with seasonal villages along the Blackstone and Nashua Rivers. English colonists from the Massachusetts Bay Colony began pushing inland in the 1670s, establishing the town of Worcester in 1684 (permanently settled by 1713) and Lancaster in 1643. These early settlements were agricultural, but the county’s destiny shifted with the Industrial Revolution. The Blackstone River’s water power made Worcester a manufacturing hub by the 1820s, and the construction of the Blackstone Canal (1828) and later railroads turned the city into a rail center.

The first major immigrant wave was Irish, arriving in the 1840s and 1850s to dig canals and lay railroad track. They settled in Worcester’s “Island” neighborhood and in mill villages like Clinton and Southbridge. By 1870, the Irish made up roughly 20% of Worcester’s population. French-Canadians followed from the 1860s through the 1890s, drawn by textile mills in Fitchburg, Leominster, and Gardner. They established tight-knit parishes and French-language schools, and their descendants remain concentrated in those cities today. Swedes arrived in the 1870s and 1880s, working in Worcester’s wire and shoe factories, settling in the city’s Belmont Street corridor and in the town of Holden.

The turn of the 20th century brought Southern and Eastern Europeans. Italians came heavily between 1890 and 1920, settling in Worcester’s Shrewsbury Street neighborhood and in Milford, where they worked in granite quarries and shoe shops. Poles arrived in the same period, concentrating in Worcester’s Kelley Square area and in Webster, where they found work in the Stevens Linen Works. Lithuanians, Greeks, and Jews from Eastern Europe also formed distinct enclaves in Worcester and Fitchburg. By 1920, Worcester was one of the most ethnically diverse cities in New England, with over half its population foreign-born or of foreign parentage.

The Great Depression and World War II slowed immigration, but the postwar era brought a new domestic migration: African Americans from the South, part of the Second Great Migration, moved to Worcester and Southbridge for factory jobs. Their numbers remained small—Black residents made up just 2% of the county in 1960—but established communities that would grow in later decades. The 1950s also saw the first wave of suburbanization, as white ethnic families moved from Worcester’s triple-deckers to new developments in Auburn, Shrewsbury, and Westborough.

Modern era (post-1965)

The 1965 Hart-Cellar Act reshaped Worcester County’s demographics, though more gradually than in coastal Massachusetts. The first post-1965 arrivals were Puerto Ricans, who began migrating to Worcester in the 1970s for manufacturing jobs. They settled in the city’s Main South and Piedmont neighborhoods, and by 1990, Worcester’s Hispanic population had reached 10%. A second wave of Hispanic growth came from the Dominican Republic and Central America in the 1990s and 2000s, expanding into Fitchburg and Leominster. Today, the county’s 13.3% Hispanic population is concentrated in Worcester (where it approaches 25%), Fitchburg (over 30%), and Southbridge (over 40%).

Asian immigration arrived later and in smaller numbers. East and Southeast Asian communities—primarily Vietnamese, Chinese, and Korean—began settling in Worcester in the 1980s and 1990s, often as refugees or through family reunification. They established a small but visible presence in Worcester’s Grafton Street area and in Shrewsbury, which now has one of the highest Asian population shares in the county. Indian subcontinent immigrants, largely professionals in healthcare and technology, began arriving in the 1990s and accelerated after 2000. They concentrate in Westborough, Southborough, and Shrewsbury, drawn by the Route 9 and I-495 tech corridor. The county’s 2.3% Indian population is now slightly larger than its 2.9% East/Southeast Asian population, a reversal of the pattern in most Massachusetts counties.

Domestic migration since 1965 has been dominated by suburbanization and exurban sprawl. White ethnic families left Worcester and Fitchburg for towns like Holden, Paxton, and Rutland in the 1970s and 1980s, while higher-income professionals moved to Westborough, Northborough, and Harvard along the I-495 belt. The county’s Black population, still just 4.6%, grew modestly through domestic migration from Boston and other Northeastern cities, settling primarily in Worcester and Fitchburg. Since 2000, Worcester County has seen net domestic out-migration of non-Hispanic whites, offset by international immigration and higher birth rates among Hispanic and Asian families.